


The Coldway, or Adventures in Fur

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: Greenglass House Series - Kate Milford
Genre: Exchange at Fic Corner 2019, Exchange at Fic Corner Pinch Hit, Gen, Rivers, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 11:57:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20389336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Superstitious folk cross themselves when they see a river otter, except for the odd romantic fool who thinks he wants to meet one. The Seiche are supposed to be beautiful, after all, although the only way they can stay ashore is if they can persuade a human to take their place....





	The Coldway, or Adventures in Fur

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/gifts).

The moment he woke up, Milo knew. Everything was muffled, as if a duck down quilt had descended on Greenglass House, tucked in at the cellars and swaddling the chimneys, so that all the familiar creaks and groans sounded as far away as if he was hearing them through a bottle-green ear-trumpet stuffed with Old Man's Moss. Even the light across his bedroom ceiling was soft and pale, washing out the spider-web cracks in the plaster. The river had frozen weeks ago, but this was the first deep snow of the winter, the promise of vacation, the harbinger of Christmas - and best of all, it was a school day.

Milo wriggled his toes and stretched his fingers. He was as snug as a bug in a rug in his own brass bed, but snow was a promise of truancy, of forts and campaigns and snowmen, and his dad was sneaky, perfectly capable of stock-piling ammunition until Miles made the mistake of venturing outside the kitchen door or beyond the cold-frames. 

"Milo!" called Mrs. Pine. "Milo, no need to get up early, the flag's up, no school today!"

"Thanks!" Milo shouted. The smell of coffee and pancakes had trailed upstairs with his mother, which meant at least one or two of the hotel's guests were already up and eating breakfast. It was unlikely that Mrs. Caraway, who helped out in the kitchen, had made through the wood and up the steep slope of the hill to Greenglass House, so Mrs. Pine would have a busy morning. His dad was probably helping out too, bringing in wood for the range and clearing the paths, for there were five guests at Greenglass House, although they mostly looked after themselves other than mealtimes. They were writers, on a two-week writing retreat, which seemed to involved much sighing, staring out of windows, and applications of tonic spiked with gin or Bookbindery Bourbon. Occasionally they convened for sessions of Women, An Inclusive Lexicography or The Illustrated Atlas of the Inner Beast. Two of them had beards, four of them had semi-attached scarves, and one of them had a patent typewriter which rattled its way into Milo's dreams on a regular basis. He'd dreamed of railroads last night.

He'd woken to the first snow of the winter. Milo flung back the covers and made a flying leap to his chest of drawers, tugging on his outdoor clothes over his striped pajamas, because snow was more important than breakfast. He hopped to his window, tugging on his boots, and flinging open his curtains with both hands, as if the world outside ready to take its bow. 

The window in Milo's room was one of the oldest in the house. It had small, square windowpanes, so old that there were elongated air bubbles trapped in the glass, and the light that shone through was tinted green, so that sometimes Milo thought his bedroom looked as if it was underneath the ocean. The window was a dormer window, and opened with a curled brass handle, so that Milo could climb out onto the fire escape which ran past his bedroom from the attic to the driveway. The fire escape was wonderfully forged of wrought iron, so sturdy that it might be the only thing in the house which did not creak or groan, but it was slippery in rain and icy in snow and Milo was not really supposed to use it on his own. The one time he had, when the Revenue had been holding his parents hostage, had been rather more frightening than he cared to remember.  
This morning, the fire escape looked like an etching against the white of the garden and the sky, every black iron curlicue festooned with its own delicate cushion of snow. Milo could not resist flinging open the window, scattering stray flakes over the toes of his woolliest socks, and leaning out. Seen between the railings of the fire escape, the garden below was a plain of soft, rounded shapes, barely recognizable as hedges and walls. Mr. Pine's footsteps led from the kitchen door towards the woodshed and back again, and a pigeon had left a three-toed trail across the garage roof, but the whole of the rest of the garden was untouched. Beyond the boundary wall, the wild trees of the wood billowed with snowfall, sailing down to the iced-over creek. Far below, towards the city, towards the black frozen-in shadows of the Flotilla hulks, he could see the signal flag that warned outliers snow had closed Nagspeake for the day.

Milo took a deep, cold breath, checked his pockets for his gloves and the talisman of his ivory dragon, and was just about to close the window when he realized there was someone in the garden. It was a small, round figure, sitting on the rim of the fountain, who must be one of the guests. Dr Abernethy, perhaps, of the beaded dreadlocks.

There were no footprints between Greenglass House and the fountain.

Unless Dr Abernethy had been out in the garden all night, there was only one person Milo knew who could cross a snow-covered yard and leave it pristine. "Meddy!" he called. "Meddy! Is that you?" 

Snow must have deadened the sound of his voice, because the figure did not turn. Milo called again, and then he closed the windows and pulled his hat over his ears and ran out of his room, past the stained glass window, through the corridor, and down the stairs. "Morning, mom!" he called, passing the hatch to the kitchen, and then he tugged on his boots and eased open the back door and stepped into winter. Cold nipped at his nose and earlobes: stray snowflakes floated gently from the gabled roofs and windowsills of Greenglass House and patterned his coat sleeves, and underfoot the snow crunched and squeaked under his boots. It was the very best kind of snow, ankle deep and not too wet, so that Milo could stomp through it and leave behind him great round bear-prints, as if he was a Bigfoot explorer or an Indian Voyageur in woven snowshoes, and not at all Milo himself. 

Milo's friend Meddy knew how to be someone else. "Meddy!" Milo called again, hoping she would hear him and turn around, because time ran differently for ghosts and he had not seen her since last winter. 

But the person sitting on the edge of the fountain was not Meddy. She was very small, and round, and she wore a snowsuit lined with a rich, dark fur, and her face had broad cheekbones and soft black eyelashes, just like Milo's own, although he had never seen her before in his life. "Oh!" Milo said.

She smiled. She had very white teeth. "Hello, Milo," she said. 

Milo swallowed. He had never seen anyone so beautiful as the woman sitting on the fountain. She was so beautiful that he completely forget everything he usually said to the hotel guests, or the people at school he didn't know, or the distant cousins he met once a year at the Nagspeake Regatta. She was so beautiful he barely noticed her long fingernails, wickedly hooked, or the single trail of webbed footprints that led to the fountain. 

"I've been waiting for you," said the woman sitting on the fountain. "We have a lot in common, you and I."

"Really?" said Milo. He felt a little odd, as if everything around him was fading, the house, the garden, the cold...

"Oh, yes," said the woman sitting on the fountain. "We are both of us misplaced. We both know what it's like, to live a life where we don't really belong. I've come to offer you a home, Milo Greenglass."

And the truth was that Milo did feel, sometimes, as if he was living someone else's life, and his own was waiting for him elsewhere. He knew his mom and his dad loved him very much, and they had chosen him, instead of all the other boys they could picked, and he loved them, but Mr. and Mrs. Pine seemed very far away in that moment. He remembered instead the boys who teased him because he could not read Mandarin, of how he dreamed of his very own family, who would look just like him, of how he had been unwanted and displaced...

"There are many of us just like us in my home, Milo Greenglass," said the woman by the fountain. "Would you like to see?"

In that moment, there was nothing Milo wanted more. "Oh, yes!" he said.

"You'll take my place?" said the woman by the fountain.

"Oh, yes!" said Milo.

And in an instant, there was no more Milo. Instead a little brown otter spun in circles in the snow, unsteady and snapping at its own tail, until the woman by the fountain laughed and kicked it away with her boots. It tumbled, head over tail, all the way through the wild wood and down the slope, bouncing over the rocks and cushioned by the snow, until it reached the very bottom of the hill where the river met the shore. There, it was flung out onto the ice, further and further, sliding across the scalloped white ice by the shore and the smooth grey ice of the river, until at last, scrabbling, it came to the edge of the dredged channel, where the icebreakers made way for the barges. There, it slid into the water, and was gone.

The woman by the fountain stood up, and dusted off her fur coat. It was a fine, dark coat, and the woman who owned it stood very tall and straight, and turned her head to the wind, as if it could tell her stories of strange lands and new seas. "Don't you come after me, Addie Whitcher," she said, to the house. "He made his choice fair and square." Then she tucked her hands in her pockets, and walked, slowly and carefully, towards the woods, and the path that led to the city.

~*~

Milo the otter was so startled by the ground, four inches under his nose and sliding away from him very fast indeed, and his four black webbed paws, and the flailing weight of his tail, and the shock of tumbling, bounce, bounce, bounce, all the way down the hill, that it was not until he began to slide over the river ice that he realized he was not a boy at all. He was an otter, with four paws and a tail. His thoughts were otterish thoughts, of the comfortable warmth of his thick furred coat and the cold dark scent of water under the ice, of the faintest trace of the passage of scaled fish and the promise of breakfast under his claws. The smell of pancakes and butter and maple syrup was fading as fast as his slide over the ice, and the dark, cracked edge where the ice met the river was promise of safety and the threshold to a brand new world.

He slid willingly into the water, swift and neat as a salmon in the neap tide of a waning moon, and the river welcomed him home.

The river was old. The river was so old it remembered when the land had been a desert, and when the sea had been an ocean. It remembered the scorching heat of the sun and the trailing fronds of ferns dabbling along its banks, and the slow grind of granite in its innards, when it had been, long, long ago, a river of ice. The river remembered fish as big as ships with teeth in their pointed snouts and claws on their bony fins: it remembered migrating herds so big the river was black, and the yawn of a crocodile the length of a train carriage, and the flowering of water lilies with leaves broader than the skin coracles of traders and travelers. It remembered the taste of sand and snow, the way ribbons of sea wrack patterned its tides in summer and the joy of the spring flood, ripping trees and boulders and bridges and houses from the dead land and carrying them into the living river. The river remembered, and Milo, swimming, remembered with it, because the current of the river was the current of the otter. He was the sea wrack, spinning in the tide, and the branch set free and sailing out to sea, and the cold quiet wait of the living ice.

He was otter, and the river was his home. He was built to swim its tides and fish its banks. Yet he was not all otter: there was a part of him that was Milo too, so that the wrecks of the river bed drew him down to explore their shattered masts and blind portholes. He swam over their splintered decks, peered through smashed planks, clambered over slumbering amphorae and nosed at tumbled iron chests that were sinking into the silt of the river bed under the tangled weight of their chains and padlocks. Silver-sided fish darted between sprung planks, and Milo the otter could not resist snapping after them, until he accidentally caught one. The desperate wriggle of it in his teeth felt so odd astonishment made him spit it out, for he had expected some other thing to set against his hunger, softer and sweeter. He had eaten off white bone plates, with metal fangs, in the warm safety of his burrow.

His burrow had walls of brick and wood. In it were people Milo loved, people who walked on two legs and breathed air. His mom. His dad. His mom! Milo recoiled, and found himself staring up, up through encompassing deep green cold of the river, up past the broken planks of the wreck of the barque, past the crushed spars, past the blind thrust of the figurehead with its tricorn hat and coiled dragon tails, to the pale mottled barrier of the ice. Too late, Miles remembered the seiche, the river otters, who could come ashore but only if they found a human to take their place. 

He was not an otter, and the river was not his home. He was Milo Pine, ship-wrecked and drifting. 

The current plucked him from the bows of the sunken boat, and Milo let it, miserable and limp. It was an eddy of a current, not the main flow of the river, and it floated him gently and slowly past the shallows at the base of the hill, around the jut of the promontory, and into the wider, deeper waters of Magothy Bay. Here where the tide ran up against the pilings of the shore the ice was thin, pancaked over the gentle rise and fall of the waves, and the light coming through it felt as translucent as the light of the stained glass windows in Greenglass House. There were sunken buoys and snapped anchor-chains and lost dinghies and abandoned diving bell on the silted harbor-front, and Milo could see the underside of the jetties and piers of the city of Nagspeake. The current rolled him onwards, past the elegant mansions of the Bay Byway to the tangled struts of the Slope, where most Nagspeakers lived. Here the ice above his head was mottled with dark patches and cracks and hacked-out blow-holes where the Slopesiders had set up stalls and drawn water from the river. For a moment, Milo thought about fighting his way to the shore, but even if he could have clawed through the ice he'd be otter stew and cured hide before he could say Milo Pine. He let the river carry him onwards, past the wooded slopes of the hill, further out into the bay, so that he could taste the salt in the water.

When he passed under the first great cold shadow, he thought it was a whale. He looked up, and realized that he was underneath the hull of a ship, a ship moored in place so long ago that its anchor chains were ribboned with sea-weed and encrusted with limpets. There were great copper sheets and haphazard hoarding on the curve of the hull, as if it had been patched over and over again. At first, Milo thought it must be the light-ship at the mouth of the bay, but then, as if this was the first of a shoal of boats, another black shadow appeared, and another, and the current spun him past chains and ropes and sunken gangplanks and sagging bridges, their slats embedded in the ice, although above the slats Milo could see the perfect footprints of a pathway carved into the ice. 

He was under the Flotilla, in winter. The passageways above his head were the Coldway, the iced winter routes between the hulls of the Flotilla, the hidden alleyways of the flotsam of the city, tangled and dangerous. People vanished, in the Coldway, runners and thieves and journalists and tourists. There were ghosts, here, where the threshold between sea and land became mutable, where lanterns blurred night and day.

Ghosts. Milo dodged a scarlet streamer and the jagged edges of a broken chamber-pot, frozen into the ice at the moment when it fell, and spread his paws wide. The current spun him past a pile of empty brandy bottles and orange peelings, shredded paper that read "_Last Will and Test_-", a single striped sock, a bone-handled fork spearing half a sausage, a broken harp-string - Milo held out for the largest anchor-chain yet, straining every muscle, and managed to catch it with the claws on his left paw. He clung, his tail splayed out, eyes slitted against the tide, looking up. The river here was tidal, and the ice thinner than any Flotilla resident would admit, weakened with the rise and fall of the river. Around the anchor chain, where the ship's hull pulled against the tide as if one day it would slip its bonds and sail again to sea, it had broken and re-formed and broken again, so that there was a precious half-inch gap between ice and metal. Milo clawed upwards. If there was any place that was not quite the river, and not quite land, the Flotilla was it: if he could win free, it would be here. And he wanted to win free. He wanted to see his mom again, his dad, his own bedroom with his own bed, with his own knitted blanket and his grandfather's brass lantern and his desk. 

He knew one person who could cross that threshold.

"Meddy!" Milo cried, swallowing saltwater. He clawed at the ice. "Meddy!"

It must be near evening. The ice was darkening, and above his head someone lit a pair of lanterns, so the light through the ice was diffuse and gold. 

"Meddy!" 

It was cold, under the ice. Milo caught a claw in the anchor chain, and the sea tasted sweetly of his own blood, before the tide swept it away. He hurt, but his nose was suddenly in the air, not the sea, and where his nose went the rest of him could follow. "_Meddy_!"

The ice cracked, sudden and sharp, and spilled him out of the river and into lantern light in a sodden, miserable hank of fur and whiskers. 

"Didn't you learn _anything_ in school?" asked Meddy.

Relief was almost as warm as his own knitted blanket. Milo dragged himself into as dignified a pose as an otter could managed.

"Oh, Milo," Meddy sighed. "It's always the clever ones." 

In the light of the Coldway lanterns, it was obvious that Meddy was not quite corporal, in a way that the electric light of Greenglass House had never quite revealed. There was no weight to her feet on the ice, and although the ropes and slats and chains of the Coldway barred her face, even the dark lantern she carried could not give Meddy her own shadow. 

Milo, ashamed, sniffled. He should have known better. He knew about the seiche. He had tracked the otters across maps of Nagspeake since before the first house was built on the Slope.

"Well, come on then," Meddy said. "You're already out of the river. Let's get you on dry land, and break the spell." 

Stiff and sore, limping, Milo followed her through the twists and turns of the Coldway, ducking through runnels and crossing over gangways, passing through alleyways and underneath the sterns of boats so heavily built up they were more like towers than ships. The ice underfoot was so thin Milo could feel it sway under his paws, but they were not alone, There were runners in the shadows alongside them, men and women with gaily patterned headscarves and the glint of gold in their ears: there was a sad-eyed captain in a uniform Milo did not recognize, and a woman in Revenue blacks, trailing dark pools of blood over the ice. 

"Annette," Meddy said, "Don't tease."

"Aw, come on," said the woman in black, grinning, as the blood dried up and disappeared. 

"It's past Halloween, and he's not a tourist," said Meddy, and held the lantern a little higher. 

They passed the shingle for _The Supernumerary_, and a frozen-in junk with a pagoda roof over its upper deck, and then, suddenly, they were striding out on the planks of a well-made jetty. They were over the ice, not on it, almost free of the river, and now Milo could see the small, round figure waiting for them at the shoreline. 

"You're lucky it's not the fishing season," Meddy muttered. 

Milo kept walking. 

"And that the tide took you to the Flotilla."

The woman in the rich fur jacket gave Milo the haughtiest of glares, but she was already shrinking, her face sprouting whiskers, just as Milo himself found he was suddenly standing on two feet, not four. He staggered, cold and tired and hungry, as the otter on the shore slipped past him and onto the ice. In seconds, she had vanished into the gathering dark.

Milo was wearing his own skin, and over it his own boots, and his very gloves, and his hat. He had fingers and toes, and he was hungry and cold, like a human who had spent a most of the day as an otter. 

"I'm really pleased to see you," he said to Meddy. "Thank you."

"It's good to see you too," Meddy said. "I hoped you'd make it to the Flotilla."

"How did you know?" asked Milo.

"I knew something had gone wrong," Meddy opened up her hand, and on it lay his ivory dragon. "I knew you wouldn't leave this behind."

"I wouldn't," said Milo. He reached out and took it back, holding it tightly, so that he could feel the edged wings bite into skin of the palm of his hand. 

"And you hadn't eaten breakfast."

"No adventures without breakfast first," said Miles, a little shakily. "Got it."

Meddy blew her nose. She had a blue-and-white spotted handkerchief, big enough to carry lunch in, or double as a sling. It matched her breeches, and her leather jacket, which looked as if they could have come from the first of the ships to moor in the shelter of the bay and stay there, the flagship of the Flotilla. 

"Don't make stupid promises while you're still alive," she said, and sniffed. "Mr. and Mrs. Pine have been looking for you all day. The watch are out. The militia was called. And the underground railway's running, the watch cleared the tracks so that everyone can get between Nagspeake and Greenglass House - we can be back in half an hour."

Milo thought of his mom's hugs and her hot chocolate, his dad's warm sweaters, the familiar groans and creaks of Greenglass House. Adventures, he thought, were all very well, but he'd be very glad indeed to be home, where he belonged.

"Thank you for finding me," he said, as they turned to walk up the steps to Quayside Station, which had once been a smuggler's stop, but had long since been discovered by tourists. 

"What are friends for?" Meddy said, and smiled back at him.


End file.
